Categories

Coding, Web design.

design

I actually lost the challenge. Totally forgot to make a design on the 28th. This should’ve been Day 6, but ah well. In this case, what I’ll simply do is push it a day extra, so the challenge would end on the 3rdof Jan instead. I will continue the challenge.

So, this is a post/comment based component. Something you’d see on any social media. It does look a little similar to Facebook but that’s just your imagination. 😋

I struck off the 24 hour limit as I’ve been insanely busy during the past 2 days. But I managed to complete this design before morning (6.30am) so I won’t be considering it a “next day” yet for the sake of not ruining my own challenge. 🤔

So this design was done in the most possibly messy way. I screwed up a lot given I was unavailable the whole day to work on anything, then sleepily designed something as simple as I could within 2 hours.

Given I almost dozed off between coding, I messed up the file system and lost all source files at the end. Thankfully, I had a tab open in the browser and saved it directly from there then as messily as I could, pushed it to the repo.

There’s nothing fancy, just a static design without any responsive or feedback details given the amount of time I had available.

There’s a little effect where the background is black and it fades in once the page has loaded completely. Obviously something broke since I made a static save from the browser and it’s now not working. Don’t really want to touch it either.

Specification

Colors used are simply black and white.

There is no responsivity given the amount of time I had but it shouldn’t do bad on devices since it’s grid-made and sticks to the center.

And we start off Day 1 with a login design component. A rich yet simple page focused on a quick login with content available to its’ left.

I first had it use a pastel blue color which looked completely off on mobile devices, rendering the white text hard to read. I then switched to a darker contrast of that color which not only looks nice on the desktop but mobile devices as well.

As I slowly find myself within the pleasant grasps of winter holidays, I come to realize that I have become rusty in web designing and there’s still yet a lot more to learn. And therefore, I challenge myself to a 10 day web design challenge.

10 days might not be a lot, but it’s a starting point.

THE CHALLENGE

Every day I must design and code something.

I can inspire from other designs.

I must do so using Flexbox & CSS Grid technologies.

It can be website components or pages or an entire package

Challenge ends on January, the 2nd; meaning I’ll be starting on the 24th of December

THE OUTCOME

I will come to par with latest CSS technologies

I will have more stuff for my portfolio

I’ll have a clear view of my abilities and time management for projects

Last year, on the 3rd of April, I lay in excite as I bragged about a design update to whatever audience I had for my portfolio that went from 💩 to something that I would call an achievement that day.

I went on about how content I was with it for the time being until about a week later the excite was replaced with a pit of angst within myself as I pondered on why everything looked so wrong.

Self-learning design has always been about observing it. Letting it sink in then having the option to replicate it. You have the tools. You know how to use them. But in the end, your mind is a blank slate.

And with that said, let’s get into a self-analysis of how I’ve taken it a step further over the year. Below you’ll witness a murder and the subjugator.

Le Subjugator

Le dieded

Now that you know, let us carry on with what was truly wrong with the former design. First of all.

I don’t know what came into mind when I designed this but as far as I can recall, it looked good on paper. What I simply wanted to implement was a Call To Action button that would scroll the viewer down to my projects section.

The button looks like a drop down and that pop out make no sense.

It was late 2016 when I caught up with simple, yet effective SVGs (in detail here). My conclusion was that abrupt ends towards the end of sections, were simply too terrible, especially the way I was executing it. SVGs came along and filled in that gap.

With a much better looking CTA (but still not the best), I managed to compliment a ‘layered’ effect of different shades. Playing around with geometry transitions has always been a favorite.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the files of my former design but those triangles slid in with a 45 degree rotation. The black and cyan-ish triangles you see there are simply squares that are hidden and partially shown on hover through that 45deg tilt. The black box tilted to the right where as the bottom, cyan box tilted upwards. This gave it this sleek look.

The job of the CTA was to scroll the user down 100 pixels to the designated section…

It was not until later, I realized that this was terrible and put some distance between it by bring the ‘about’ section before the portfolio. Talk about proper hierarchy.

The cringe

What you see below that paragraph of cringe is a bunch of icons of the ‘skillsets’ I have. Before this, I had bars that represented this, similar to my 2015 design:

But the thing is, there’s no limits to these skills. Something new comes out every day and I was simply pulling out the experience percentage based on my then beliefs.

Instead, I’ve replaced it with something generic and descriptive. This goes below the about section.

The simple “Biography”

Speaking of the about section, here’s how it looked before.

Talk about a cringeful, long description with font size big enough for sufficient for the elders only.

I’ve changed this entirely. It’s now the first section, so it’s right below the header.

Pretty dank, aye?

Navigation, ahoy

Before we progress, there is one more thing we need to talk about and that’s the sticky navigation bar that follows you down.

Before I had this dull piece of stick

And now, there’s this

The portfolio’s new design is supposed to have more contrast. As you may have noticed (or not), the height of the sticky nav bar is much smaller now. It adds more breathing space to the page by tens of pixels.

There’s also a little border at the bottom to make it ‘pop-out’ with a much more elaborate shadow at the bottom than the former.

The Portfolio

Let’s talk about the portfolio section. Before it was boring cards with direct links to the download or view button and the cards themselves had some design issues. I don’t have a pre-existing screenshot but they looked like the ones now except the images got squeezed or stretched.

I’ve updated that part and divided the portfolio into 3 categories, Client, Designs & Apps.

Taking guess would be enough to realize that the client category is for client work, the design category is for web designs I make myself, be it free or premium. And Apps are app websites I’ve developed.

But that’s not the best part of the portfolio, you may see a familiar design on hover here lacking the download and view buttons. That’s because it’s begging to be clicked.If it’s downloadable, a small download button appears as well. Now once you click on the card, it fetches the details for the item via AJAX and using Bootstrap Modals, we get this beauty.

I can safely say that this is probably the first modal I’ve designed, hence some design issues here too. I need to rework the bottom part, not sure at the moment how though. But this is what I’ve got. It’s quick and simple. Bootstrap Modals are a bonus with User Experience. Click on the X or behind the modal and you’re back to the portfolio.

The Bottom

The contact section may look nearly identical to the former but rest assured it’s been revamped from a user experience perspective. Instead of the good old page reload for the submission process, it now utilizes the power of AJAX for a synchronous update on the spot. It’s acquainted with Sweet Alerts and Google’s reCAPTCHA which provides some mercy on the database.

There’s 860 messages of which 4 are actual messages and the rest of it are spam. My website is quite popular with the bots – heh.

Messages from Bots

Nevertheless, here’s how fast and simple it is now for anyone to drop in a message.

As for the footer, I’ve removed the bulky useless section it had before and replaced it with something simple.

You may have realized, I removed the Twitter Feed! Actually, I had plans for it. Right now I’m using free hosting from 000webhost. It disallows the use of REST APIs and that sucks. I actually have the whole Twitter API, cache, etc ready to roll out. All it’s lacking is the design. I thought I’d put it in the footer but that’s just meh. I thought I should promote my blog posts on my portfolio as well so I’ve been thinking of making an entire new section dedicated to a twitter feed (“recent rambling”) and blog posts (“recent posts”). I haven’t designed anything yet as they both use REST APIs and until I move to a proper limitless domain, I won’t be updating on this.

Enough of the design, Let’s talk about the inside.

It’s what’s on the inside that counts.

I’ve re-coded everything in PHP, still not following the MVC structure but rather my own structure, which is truly odd to explain.

I’ve moved from using CSS to LESS. LESS is basically better CSS syntax. Next up, I’ve started using Bootstrap as the front end framework. As much as I promised to use only made-from-scratch stuff, I’ve really been slowing myself down. Bootstrap has built in modals, grids, etc which really put off workload. Both of these combined proved a faster and easier workflow. I’ve really cut in half the time it takes to code a design.

What now?

I’m still not content with how it looks. I’ve still yet to implement the section that consists of my blog and twitter posts. Also, the website lacks responsiveness (not adapted for mobile or tablets). I’m too lazy to add it now but I’ll probably ninja add it later on.

One more thing!

Branding. So far I’ve not used any logos to represent myself and really needed a favicon (that tiny icon you see on your tab before the web page’s title). So I followed my life motto, “Why not?”, and thus utilized my expert GIMP skills (2poor4photoshop) and came up with the following.

As you can see, it looks terrible at the edges, but that’s not going to show in a small logo or favicon and I’m too lazy to perfect the small details it at the moment. Maybe later on?

This concludes the berating of my former portfolio and what I did to upgrade it.